My earliest memory of photography is a Kodak instamatic camera that my sister had when I was about 5 years old. I borrowed it and went to a game park, where I shot some terrible pictures of the animals and my friends.
Like many photojournalists, I have no formal training. I largely taught myself photography in a darkroom at school.
My first photo assignment was for the paper at the University of Cape Town, where I studied. I had to shoot images of climbers attempting to master a tricky overhang on an artificial climbing wall. Mostly they fell off. It made for quite good pictures.
While at university, I began taking photos of protests and political events in the 1980s before the end of apartheid rule. My training in social anthropology left me with a keen interest in how society works. After completing my degree, photojournalism seemed like a logical progression.
It’s hard to say which assignment has left the biggest mark on me. Covering the first democratic elections in South Africa was really inspiring. One of the most challenging stories, however, has been dealing with the effects of HIV/AIDS in rural areas of South Africa.
The assignments I like best are the ones that give you the chance to change people’s perceptions and challenge stereotypical ways of understanding complex situations.
My biggest lesson has been not to take anything for granted. As photojournalists, we walk in and out of different worlds and we need to remember that our own reality is not necessarily the same as the reality that other people have to deal with. The world is infinitely more complicated than the way we perceive it.
